This week saw the celebration of International Women’s Day, a day as important today as it has ever been. Women’s voices are all too often struggling to be heard across the globe, which is why it’s so important to celebrate women’s successes in business, in politics and in the arts. Successes, of course, like the Brontë sisters, who are surely the most remarkable literary siblings of them all.
There have been other cases of families producing more than one celebrated writer, I think of the likes of the Dumas and Amis families, or the brothers Grimm. I think the achievement of the Brontës, however, remains unmatched. It’s incredible to think that three sisters from a relatively inauspicious background, with little formal schooling and in an area of England which was extremely under-privileged at the time, should all produced such amazing and enduring works of literary genius. It’s a story almost as good as the ones Charlotte, Emily and Anne set down on paper, which is why we should remember and celebrate them not just on International Women’s Day but every day.
The Brontës, or at least one of them, were also being celebrated amidst exalted company on 17th June 1911, as this picture of The Historical Pageant Of Great Women shows.
This date was chosen as a gathering for suffragettes and suffragists from across the nation. Organised by the Women’s Social and Political Unions, a huge crowd of women gathered and then marched through the capital’s streets. The date had been carefully chosen as it was a week before the coronation procession of new King George V. Here then was a large group of women saying that their voice needed to be heard too at this time of change for the nation, and at some points it was estimated that the women’s procession stretched for several miles.
Many marchers carried the names of prominent women from recent British history, which is why one marcher proudly holds aloft the banner bearing the name of Charlotte Brontë. Another nearby marcher holds the name of Harriet Martineau aloft: Martineau was at one time a close friend of Charlotte’s, but political and religious differences eventually led to a severing of their friendship. Other banners in this photo celebrate Florence Nightingale, Grace Darling and Mrs Charles Kean – a reference to Ellen Kean, who had been a popular Victorian actress working alongside her husband.
What would Charlotte Brontë have made of it all? It’s hard to say, as Charlotte often held strident political views of a rather conservative nature, but there can be no doubt that Charlotte, along with her sisters Anne and Emily, did much to set on paper what it was like to be a woman in the nineteenth century – characters and novels which still resonate today.
I hope you can join me next week for another new Brontë blog post.